Warmists are having a tough time of things these days.
First the Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed that said there’s no need to panic about global warming, signed by 16 scientists. They had the temerity to point out that CO2 isn’t a rampaging, Gaia-stomping, vengeful gas, but just plant food:
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle.
As if that wasn’t bad enough news for hippies, pesky journalists noticed the UK’s own Met. Office data suggests a nasty cold snap is far more likely than a warmer phase:
According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.
However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.
Cold weather is more dangerous to mankind than warming, so we need to harness all the energy we can, from whatever sources are available to us. That includes fossil fuels and alternative energy.
With that latter category in mind, does anyone have an idea how to capture the unstable but massive energy potential of Joe Romm head explosions? As more people jump off the warming bandwagon, and as the planet steadfastly refuses to follow sloppy computer models but do its own thing, Rommplosions are likely to be more frequent. Seems like a shame to waste them.
Rommplosion energy. It's the future, or something
to parse out the sentences as people seem not able to understand plain old english:
The lack of warming for more than a decade… (It has been around 15 years since any warming has taken place. This means in the last Decade, no warming has been abserved. All claims of warmest sommer ever et al have all been revised back down under the temps seen summer of 1998) …—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. The IPCC has been around longer but 22 years ago, when we had not yet reached the “record” warmth of 1998 and was foisting models on us that have long proven faulty. See 22 years ago until 1998 it was warmer one year after the next. Then, after 1998 the effects of the Sun shutting down for some time (and it is still rather non-active with sunspots, though flares are back up) stopped the warming we were seeing. See, we can have warming in 22 years, but none in over a decade. Simple, huh? Do they not teach basic English in the schools anylonger?
I see the last comment is unsigned any way. But it has all the usual skewed arguments, and a signature of a different kind – misrepresenting what someone said or wrote:
“Isn’t this a little contradictory? They claim there isn’t any warming, but then say the warming is smaller than the IPCC predicted. So which is it?”
What those scientists actually wrote in the WSJ article was:
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.
.. which means it’s BOTH – the two are not mutually exclusive.
Here is an article that tells the real story of the WSJ article and also mentions the UK Met Offices REAL findings.
Have a nice day!
Stop the press: misleading climate change op-ed in WSJ
by Graham Readfearn, a freelance journalist
What’s news these days when it comes to climate change? Could it be the news that rising temperatures could severely affect the world’s wheat crops maybe? Or how about how human emissions of carbon dioxide have “raised ocean acidity far beyond the range of natural variations”?
Nah. Well, at least not if you’re The Australian, which just loves to send reality spinning down rabbit holes when it comes to climate change. What’s news for The Australian is that 16 “scientists” with outlying views on the risks of human-caused climate change have dusted off their previously debunked talking points for an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.
So confident was The Australian about the “facts” contained in the editorial, they didn’t bother to get a single response from an actual working Australian climate scientist. So let’s do a quick fact check for ourselves.
In the original WSJ article, the scientists?—?most of which are well-known contrarians?—?suggest “a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed”. To back up this claim of a “growing number” they give no evidence, aside from telling the story of how a distinguished physicist resigned from the American Physical Society last year.
Dr Ivar Giaever, 82, was unhappy about the organisation’s position on climate change. At the time, Giaever said he was didn’t like how the APS was using the term “incontrovertible” to describe evidence of global warming.
Giaever did win a Nobel Prize in 1973, but a search for any scientific research he’s published on climate change comes up blank. Back in 2008, Giaever was describing himself as a sceptic on this issue.
So not only is Giaever a non-expert when it comes to climate change science, he’s not even part of an unproven “growing number” that the contrarians say are out there (but can’t provide evidence for).
The publication of the opinion article has caused a bit of a stir in the US. The Union of Concerned Scientists was, as their name suggests, concerned, saying the article was “deeply misleading”. When it comes down to the science, the co-signatories’ core argument was “the lack of global warming for well over 10 years”.
But you don’t need to rely on a statement from the concerned UCS, or anyone else for that matter, to see the contrarians’ claims are misleading. Even the reporter at The Australian would have been able to check the claim to see if it was correct.
So has global warming stopped? Have we really started to see a reversal of a rising trend in global temperatures that has seen each decade since the 1940s warmer than the previous one?
According to the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, since 1880 the 10 warmest years on the planet (warmest first) have been 2010, 2005, 1998, 2003, 2002, 2009, 2007, 2004 and 2001. NOAA places last year, 2011, as the 11th warmest year on record and the 35th year in a row where global temperatures have been above average.
But that’s just once source, albeit an authoritative one. Let’s try NASA, which puts 2011 as the ninth warmest year on the meteorological record. This, says NASA, “continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000”.
If we check with a third source, this time the UK’s Met Office, we find its analysis of global temperatures also puts 2011 as the 11th warmest year on record. The Met Office also pulled together the other main long-term temperature records to see how they compare. Check out the graph here.
Already, the claim that global warming has stopped is looking flakier than the commentators’ publishing record on climate science. But then they say this “lack of warming” is smaller than IPCC predictions, suggesting “computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause”.
Isn’t this a little contradictory? They claim there isn’t any warming, but then say the warming is smaller than the IPCC predicted. So which is it?
On the academic-driven news and comment website The Conversation, Dr Andrew Glickson points out the contrarians don’t say which IPCC report they were referring to, which makes it hard to check whether they’re right or not.
But Glickson does point out current rises in global temperatures are at least twice as fast as the rate of temperature rise that occurred after the past two Ice Ages.
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